The Culture War Is Really a Culture Circus

I went to see The Passion of the Christ last Wednesday
afternoon in a working-class neighborhood of the Bronx, with an
audiencea full housecomposed mostly of blacks and Latinos. It was
a stunning experience in a way that I didn't expect. The first scene
of scourging, in which giddy, leering Roman guards torture Jesus with
canes, cudgels and whips studded with glass shards, evoked a powerful
reaction from the audience. There were gasps and audible sobbing,
which continued for some time. But as the torture went
on, and on, as Jesus staggered through the Stations of the Cross,
punched and kicked and flayed again, the theater fell silent. By the
time of the Crucifixion, the audience seemed emotionally exhausted
and numbed to the violence. There was no catharsis. I saw only dry
eyes as we left.

This dispiriting experience was not merely a failure of Mel Gibson's
art, but it also seemed to be evidence of
a growing American affliction: we are addicted to the explicit and
then quickly inured to it. We are in need of ever more shocking
images to stimulate our attention, impervious to nuance or subtlety.
There are political implications to this. Democracy isn't easy in
such an environment. "The things that shock are the things that get
through," says John DiIulio, former director of the Bush
Administration's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.
"Meanwhile, serious consideration of issues of monumental importance
to the public good has become impossible."

Some elections skim the surface of American life; others cut very
close to the bone. In this campaign we have already been buffeted by
exceedingly powerful social and political imagesmen kissing other
men on the steps of San Francisco's city hall, Saddam being pulled
from a hole, John Kerry hugging a man he saved in Vietnam, Janet
Jackson's exposed breast at the Super Bowl, George W. Bush prancing
prematurely in his flight suit, Howard Dean screaming, Bush bringing
turkey to the troops. The chaotic rush of imagesand the President's
constant invocation of incendiary words like war and evilsuggests a
portentous, emotional year in the offing. It is possible that the
passions raised by such images will lead to an intense national
debate over the decisions made by President Bush: to go to war in
Iraq and confront the threat of terrorism the way he has, to
drastically cut taxes, to create an expensive new Medicare
prescription-drug entitlement. But it is also possible that a public besotted with the sensational will be unable to engage in a
substantive argumentand instead be deflected into periphera like
the quality of Bush's Vietnam-era service, the controversy
surrounding Kerry's antiwar protests and the need for a
constitutional amendment prohibiting gay marriage. In 2004 the
quality of the debate may be the election's most important question:
Are we going to be serious about this or not?

It is not hard to argue about two guys kissing, or a teenager getting
a late-term abortion, or the death penalty, or school prayer, or flag
burning, or smoking marijuana. There are even some broader principles
that can be discussed: Should the question of gay marriageor
abortion, for that matterbe decided by the judgment of a court or
by legislation? Is there any way to limit our commercial culture's
ability to narcotize children with an endless stream of sex and
violence? But those deeper arguments usually get as much attention as
the size of the budget deficit. In fact, the Culture War isn't really
a war; it's more a public entertainment, a Culture Circus. Wars
require combatants. The general public is not up in arms but
plastered in armchairs, occasionally roused to flaccid pique by a
handful of show-biz gladiatorsRosie O'Donnell, Rush Limbaugh, Al
Franken, Jerry Falwellwho fight carefully selected papier-mache
lions.

The real question here is a matter of proportion, the tendency of
lurid cultural issues to crowd out the more important stuff. Even
Iraq has settled into the dim middle distance. Few images from the
war are as startlingas "spontaneous"as Justin Timberlake's
ripping Janet Jackson's bodice. The violence of combat is sanitized
into banality by squeamish editors. And there are no compelling
images to convey the absence of weapons of mass destruction or how
difficult it will be for an American Secretary of State to bring a
credible argument for war to the United Nations anytime soon.

Then again, voters in the early Democratic primaries, a perversely
serious minority of the electorate, rejected the passionate Howard
Dean in favor of John Kerry, a candidate nuanced to the point of
paralysis. In the dictionary, passion is defined as "suffering" first
and then as "emotion ... as opposed to reason." Kerry isn't
emotional, and he certainly isn't addicted to the explicit. In the
year of The Passion, he stands as a quixotic reproach to the
prevailing sensationalism, an unintentional rebel against our
shock-a-minute culture.